Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Naomi Solomon

All told, Julia did not give off the impression that she would be a thoroughly difficult roommate.

Julia laughed a lot, and she had a great laugh. It started out low and soft, a rumbling in her chest, but when it really got going it was high-pitched, perky and joyous but not annoying—like the kind of person whose conversations you would want to eavesdrop on in public. Julia also had a great smile, cherubic between round pink cheeks, and her blue eyes—I’m going to say it—her blue eyes sparkled behind her glasses. In almost every way she came off as easy-going and even-tempered.

The awkwardness came from her English (which she spoke with precision and gusto). Julia was a German student, and the two of us were living in a university apartment with another American student, a Mexican student, and four local—that is to say, Spanish—students. I was the first of the non-native speakers to move in before the semester began, and though I had the notion that my housemates probably spoke some English, I never tested it. I figured I was in Spain, living with Spanish-speakers, and really when else was I going to have the chance to mime/interpretive-dance half of everything I wanted to say?

The day after she moved in, I came home to find Julia having a conversation with my roommate, Ana, entirely in English. For two weeks I had been saying things like “the yellow piece in the center of the egg,” and “I walked [circular hand gestures for ‘all around’] the street but I couldn’t find the store of food,” and here was Ana keeping up perfectly well with Julia’s rapid-fire dissertation on her first day of classes.

“Hola, um, you guys,” I said from the doorway, going through a mental catalogue of all the under-my-breath sing-talking I’d done in the past two weeks. (I tend to talk to myself a lot, and at some point I’d decided that singing everything I would normally say whilst talking to myself would make me seem less crazy to a roommate who hopefully wouldn’t realize that I was asking, “Where’s my clean underwear?” to the tune of “Livin’ on a Prayer.” In retrospect, Ana probably knew Bon Jovi and could have figured out that I was getting the words wrong regardless of any language barrier.)

I tried to bring it up casually with the other American in the house, Rochelle.

“I know,” she said, skipping straight to annoyance while I loitered in vague embarrassment. “When I got up yesterday she was complaining to Marco about how all her professors and classmates and everyone talk too fast, and she’s sooooo glad she can come home and speak English.”

“Wow… and English is totally her second language. I wish I felt that way about my second language.”

“But come on—we’re in Spain and we’re supposed to be working on our Spanish. It’s like she’s totally missing the point. Hey—let’s agree, let’s only speak Spanish at home. ¿Vale?”

So we agreed.

That night I walked into the kitchen to find Ana, Julia, and Rochelle all in various stages of cooking and eating dinner.

“¿Cómo van sus clases?” Rochelle asked the room.

“I guess they’re good, but one of my professors doesn’t know how to run a discussion. He will never call on the people who actually have something to say, he just goes down the class list and picks anyone to answer the question. And half the class hasn’t done the reading.” Julia paused for breath and Rochelle seized the moment.

“¿Y tú, Ana?”

“Más o menos bien,” Ana answered, “pero creo que esta clase de química me va a matar…”

Julia wasn’t quite glaring, but her eyes weren’t doing their usual sparkly thing, either. Her cheeks even seemed less pink than they had a few moments ago.

“Y… I don’t know why I’m even taking it,” Ana finished.

This turned into the pattern when Julia was in the room: every conversation was a tug-of-war between English and Spanish, with Julia on one side, Rochelle and I on the other, and the rest of the roommates holding their hands just above the rope a foot or two from the center, unwilling to throw themselves into the struggle. (Though I’ll confess that Rochelle and I sometimes cheated if we were the only two at home.)

Midway through the semester, Julia slowly tapered off from talking to either of us, until one day Rochelle and I found ourselves being ignored in all English conversations, trapped in the stuttering limbo between pride and a limited vocabulary.

by Katherine Cooper

The school for kids with special needs was two or three miles east off the main route in town. It was on a long stretch of grass surrounded by the county TB clinic and the juvenile detention center for girls. It sort of felt as though the town’s bleakest figures had been shooed away, only to converge later, in the corner of some abandoned field. The buildings were nearly identical from the outside—low masses of grey concrete—indistinguishable intuitions.

But inside, the school was different. It was lovely and colorful, brimming with a kind of warmth and energy that one would never suspect from its desolate surroundings. The walls were cluttered with collages and photographs, enormous signs with doilies and glitter and thick bold lettering. Students were awarded for everything, all the time: Most Helpful, Most Friendly, Most Smiley. Their faces taped onto glossy laminated frames.

Their disabilities ranged from mild to severe and affected all the different realms—emotional, physical, and cognitive. There were kids in wheelchairs with twisted limbs and tangles of tubes linking different parts of their bodies, but also those who ran freely in the yard with the ease and recklessness of most five year olds. I worked in Daniel’s classroom for a few semesters over the course of two years.

Daniel, by this point ten years old, had borne a diagnosis of autism for many years. Daniel was a big kid, heavy and ungainly, with a gentle face and a thick head of dark, curly hair. He wore baggy corduroy paints and white sneakers with Velcro straps. He had no verbal skills but used a range of different sounds and noises to articulate his needs and frustrations; I could never tell how he really felt about me—sometimes he’d smirk at me in this way that made me think that he loved fucking with me, that he was capable of so much more than he was letting on but wanted to see me fight for his attention. Other times he’d give me a look that indicated something like complicity, like we were working for the same team.

The other five or six kids in the class fit in at various place along the autism spectrum, some a lot more high-functioning than Daniel. The teacher was this amazing reservoir of patience and energy, though I don’t know what kind of progress they made—or even really how to measure such a thing. But they sang songs and learned how to hold pencils and trace letters and cut shapes from cardboard. She spoke in short, choppy phrases, telling the kids everything they would do as they did it. She guided them carefully through the routine of the day, always eased them slowly into change.

Daniel seemed to have a constant swell of energy trapped in his body. He was always tapping his feet and playing with this plastic, spongy lizard—shaking it violently between two of his fingers. Sometimes we held hands and jumped on the trampoline together, his legs flinging wildly behind him. Other times he’d purposely knock paint onto the floor or groan and clench his fingers when we’d try to write his name or make a mother’s day card.

Toward the end of our time together, Daniel was going through puberty. It was a really tough time, and seemed almost impossible for the teacher or her aids to help navigate him through it. The teacher was constantly reminding him to stop touching himself—there was a familiar chorus that rang throughout the semester: “Hands out of pants, Daniel. Hands out of pants.” She used the same sing-songy voice as always.

In May, the teacher told Daniel that I would be leaving, that I was moving away and wouldn’t be coming back to class. I hoped that in some small way, Daniel had appreciated our time together. I wasn’t sure it had amounted to much but he had enriched my life in some elusive way that I couldn’t quite understand. Maybe it was that we were connecting on some really basic, human level, one uncluttered by conventional language. Daniel looked at me blankly for a moment and then he stuck his hands down his pants. I turned away, but even from the corner of my eye I saw it—his hands moving around, in front and then in back. Then he took one hand out and he slapped me, a quick and ugly sting across my lips. He smiled, grunted twice, and then skipped away.

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by Joa Suorez

Soak the day
until its soft colors
drain and only
an outline
of all we did
remains—a memory
new enough
we still see it
the same—a vague shape
against the sun
that evening
carries away.

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by Liz Mathews

In years now long gone, summer vacations around the Midwest were what my family did, yet regardless of where our vehicle took us, there was really only one destination for my sister and I: the hotel swimming pool. My parents were well aware of this, and, because flaring tempers on family vacations were inevitable, they did everything in their power to avoid trouble from the beginning. This included booking hotel rooms in hotels with pools.

Visiting the Badlands during a tornado warning? Gazing upon the purple beauty of a waterfall in the Ozarks? Counting the number of forest fire warning signs in Manitoba? Sure, those things are fine, whatever. Dog-paddling in the lukewarm water of the humid hotel swimming pool room? I’m there before you can say “No lifeguard on duty.”

My sister, too.

So a few weeks ago, when our mother confirmed that yes, there was a swimming pool at the Crowne Plaza in Wauwatosa, swimsuits were the first things in our respective bags. My family descended on Wisconsin from various places in the United States, and congregated at my aunt and uncle’s home for an evening of eating and boozing. And then more of the eating, and also the drinking. The idea of the hotel swimming pool lingered, though.

It was late by the time my family made it to the Crowne Plaza. Still, since it was open 24 hours, my sister and father and I looked in on the pool. I was dissuaded by the teenage girl in her bikini and her boyfriend in board shorts. My sister’s face showed obvious disappointment, but we agreed that bright and early the next morning, the pool was ours.

Except that it wasn’t. At 8:15am there was a middle-aged man checking his Blackberry in one of the lounge chairs, and an older man doing who-knows-what in the deeper end of the pool. My sister and I entered the water. It was colder than expected. We stood awkwardly. We swam the width of the pool several times, only to then stand awkwardly again.

Soon enough the old man exited the pool. “I hope I wasn’t in your way,” he said as he passed us with his snorkel mask. “Oh, no,” we assured him.

The other man continued his Blackberry checking. We continued being in the hotel swimming pool.

After we’d done some racing up and down the length of the pool, and zombie walked some more lengths, an older woman entered the room and started working out in the whirlpool. We stood awkwardly some more, and considered the clock on the wall.

It took us a while to actually extricate ourselves from the pool, despite the sense of uncertainty that pervaded the whole swim session. Maybe we were clinging to memories of our younger selves, of summer vacations and breaks from schoolwork. Maybe we just didn’t want to fight over the shower. I can’t speak for my sister.

But if this is growing up, then what I can do is sigh.

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by caitlin macrae

Something is wrong with the bus drivers of north Brooklyn. I’d like to chalk it up to the arrival of these new chatty buses, the result of hours upon hours of driving across town listening those pesky recorded voices. That condescending, know-it-all motherfucker intoning demands to move away from the doors even when you’re trying to exit, the shrill smarm of the woman exhorting everyone to please exit through the rear doors every time the stop button is pushed, even though people will continue to shove their way to the front doors no matter what she says. I’d like to blame it on these stupid buses, but I don’t think I can. The buses have been here for a while; the drivers have started to scare me only recently.

They are flying down the streets. This feels nice when I’m on the bus, late for work and need to move quickly, but less so when standing on the street in the middle of a heat wave. They are not stopping at the stops even when there are people there, leaving folks stranded in the humid air with sweaty upper lips and pink cheeks, much later now than they wanted to be. They shame old ladies whose cards have run out. I have seen this happen six times in the past week, the same scenario. “Ain’t gonna matter how many times you swipe that card, it’s empty. Empty, empty, empty. You listenin’ to me? Ain’t gonna happen, lady. Just ain’t gonna happen.” The women look down at their orthopedic sandals, toes encased in nylons. They shuffle through their change purses and pull out crumpled dollars. “What you think this is? We don’t take dollars! Shit!” The buses, you see, do not take dollar bills; unless you’re wandering around with two hundred and twenty-five cents packed away in your pockets, you’re shit out of luck. So the old women shuffle down the aisles, holding bills out hoping someone will have change while the drivers mutter their irritation. There is more honking, more yelling at other drivers, a surprising amount of unrestrained swearing. Someone asks for the back doors, notoriously sticky, to be opened. Ignored, they ask more than once. “Can you just wait a minute? Hold up, DAMN!”

Everyone on this air-conditioned, super talky, driven-by-an-angry-person bus seems to take on this blind rage, the feel tense and irritated. Nobody gives their seat up for anyone; people with big, bulky packages are roundly shunned with unmoved shins and feet, unapologetic shoulder nudges. Of all the places to be in a heat wave, you’d think that an air-conditioned boat, careening down the road would be the happening place to be, soothing enough to unfurl the white banner of inner calm. But it’s becoming less and less worth it, and I find myself taking to the pavement a few stops early, where the crazy gets muffled by the warm sticky air.

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by Liz Wyckoff

Mr. Chartrand lives in Harrisville, New York—a village forty miles south of my hometown, with a population of six-hundred and fifty-three. He’s eighty-seven years old, wears his shirts tucked in, and has deep creases stretching from either side of his nose to the corners of his mouth.

Since he was twelve, Mr. Chartrand has been a dowser. He uses a stick to detect water far below the earth’s surface. Some people call this water witching or divining or doodlebugging. Others call it bunk. Rubbish. Hooey. Mr. Chartrand calls it “a gift from the good Lord.”

“There’s quite a lot to it,” he says. The stick must come from a fruit tree. It must be large and freshly cut and shaped like a Y. He pulls the branch apart with both hands and walks off in the direction of hidden water veins. Once he’s found them, he paces off the precise location for a well and provides instructions on where to dig and how deep.

Some dowsers have been known to locate other things, like gemstones or gravesites, but not Mr. Chartrand. He can’t explain why—he’s just good at finding water.

Still, I can’t help but wish he’d help me find other things. I wish Mr. Chartrand could pay me a visit, clip a crotched branch from a cherry tree down the street, and extend his arms to find me a job, for instance. I’d follow him and his tucked-in shirt on a jagged path across town to an office building with some open position waiting to be filled.

Or, even better, what if Mr. Chartrand could find love? He’d collect an apple bough from behind my apartment and allow its invisible pull to lead him to another human—some man that he could mark for me like an X in the dirt.

Maybe each of us has a gift for finding something. Lucky pennies on the sidewalk, arrowheads in the weeds, used clothing that doesn’t smell, funny friends with infectious laughs. And maybe those things are just as important as water.

If I told that to Mr. Chartrand, I’m not sure he’d agree. But I bet he’d smile, stretching those creases on his face just like a divining rod, and that might tell me all I need to know.

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by Katherine Cooper

I saw Lindsay everyday for a while. She’d always sit, hunched over, beside a stained yellow wall at the L stop at Union Square. She had pale skin, watery green eyes and a spray of freckles across her face.

I didn’t ever hear her ask people for money, or even really see her look up. But she held onto one
of those cardboard signs, generic in its pleading: desperate for cash, homeless and alone, please help. In the midst of their frenzied, hurried commutes, I watched people stop and stare, frozen for a moment in their tracks. Two seconds, or maybe three. She was just so young, undoubtedly still a teenager. I think we all stopped, struck by the same thing—this girl, so sad but also salvageable.

I never stopped to talk to her, but sometimes she’d linger in my thoughts throughout the day. So many of the folks I see and work with everyday are hardened veterans of the streets—they’ve been outside for so long that they can’t even pinpoint when or how they got there. But Lindsay, it seemed, was still right in the very thick and heart of that moment.

Maybe it could be a minor blip, just a tiny part of her story. I imagined her having fled from a drunken, abusive father in a cold, Midwestern town. Or maybe she’d been shooting up heroin for years and her mother, weak and exasperated, just couldn’t take it any longer. A couple of Greyhound buses through the night and here she was.

After several days of passing Lindsay during my morning commute, I saw her downtown by my office. She was sitting cross-legged against some big stone building just off Wall Street. My coworker and I crouched down and did our usual spiel. How long had she been staying outside? Did she need any services? Did she want a list of places in the area to shower or get a warm meal? It was the first time we’d made eye contact. She told us—softly and patiently—that no, she didn’t need or want anything. She said she was okay, but she looked so weak. It seemed as though it’d taken so much effort—all her strength—to utter the simplest phrase. I started to walk away but then asked her name.

Lindsay was back by the L train the next day. I had left work sort of late and missed the flurry of rush hour commuters. Her head was down and her hair, thin and blond, hung limply by her face.

“Lindsay?”

She looked up and said hey. I realized I had absolutely nothing to say. I just felt so compelled to call her name—to somehow make use of the information she’d been willing to offer me. We were quiet for a moment and then a guy approached us. He was tan and heavy, his hair fragrant and slicked back. He stared at her and then turned to me.

“Is this for real?” he asked, as though we were watching those men who, covered entirely in gold or silver paint, pose as statues.

“Excuse me?”

“Is this kid for real? Or is she faking?”

I told him no, I didn’t think she was faking. He dropped a five dollar bill by her feet and then headed down toward the track.

On the train back to Brooklyn, he sat down next to me. “You know, it’s impossible to tell, she could’ve been pretending. You never know what someone will do for a sociology degree.”

I said I hoped she was faking, but it seemed unlikely. He told me he could probably help her out a bit, and that he was so rich he basically owned the Giants. He pressed the back of his hands against his cheeks, blotting the sweat that had accumulated on his thick, leathery skin.

I haven’t seen Lindsay since that day. I wonder if maybe, she made it home—if she too felt what the commuters sensed that morning by the train: that tiny flicker of hope.

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by Ian F. King

Like countless people across the planet, I’ve been trying to readjust to regular life after spending the past month wholly obsessed with the daily excitement and drama of the World Cup. Before I present myself as a knowledgeable soccer enthusiast, it’s important that I admit to unintentional bandwagon jumping. The thing is, I didn’t want to be obsessed, but a few minutes into the USA vs. England match, I became irreversibly so. A soccer fanatic had lain dormant in my heart since 2004, when I was living in a cramped mouse-infested flat in London and my Anglo-Zimbabwean roommate Kieran taught me how to appreciate the game during the Euro tournament that year. During this recent USA vs. England game, I reverted to that manic fan from six years ago, only ten times more so.

The problem was, after the first round of the finals, I was left with no one to cheer for. Being a USA fan first, and England fan second (England being the country in which I learned to love the sport, after all), the weekend of June 26th and 27th was not an easy one to bear. I was almost inconsolable when Germany got their fourth goal against England, and was still mildly despondent at work the next day. Orphaned, my allegiances began to shift wildly. I begrudged Germany their win (though couldn’t muster the same hard feelings toward Ghana), so decided I would cheer for their upcoming opponents Argentina, who also wore stylish jerseys and had Lionel Messi on their roster, a player of extraordinary talent who on at least one occasion has been referred to as “the Little Magician”.
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by Joa Suorez

We saw the way
you let love in,
the little door
you opened
when the light
began to change—
and night pressed
cool against your face.

When your heart
began to swell
the way the moon will
just before rain
we saw the wide world
in your eyes again,
that wild joy
love sometimes brings.

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by Liz Mathews

You’ve seen her all across the United States, primarily in middle- to upper-middle-class neighborhoods, where all the children have their own bedrooms and mothers fret about balanced meals and getting to soccer practice on time. She is tall and slender and sports shoulder-length hair, typically drawn back into a loose ponytail. She favors shorts or skirts in the summertime that are cut high enough to suggest something, but are still long enough to pass the scrutiny of parents and schoolteachers. She is thirteen to seventeen years old, probably a good student but keeps it on the down-low, and has no problem speaking her mind when something’s on it.

She wants to be an artist or a writer. But she has a problem.

“My life is just too good,” she says. “I don’t have any struggles, so I don’t have anything to write about.”

She will pause, and twirl the end of her ponytail around a finger.

“Ashley got upset with me when I told her that,” she’ll continue, “And told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. Like I should be happy or something! Nothing I ever create will have any substance. I haven’t suffered.”

Then she’ll sigh. Maybe she’ll have a stick of Burt’s Bees pomegranate lip balm in her pocket, which she will take out and apply.

“I mean, maybe I shouldn’t complain. Maybe I am lucky. But I haven’t ever starved, and I’m not manic-depressive, and my parents aren’t divorced. Nothing I create can possibly say anything.”

And here, you will sigh, though as imperceptibly as possible. If you are her friend, you will remain silent because you know that any response will be the wrong one. And even if you aren’t her friend, it’s best not to say anything. Telling her, “Eating disorders worked for a friend of mine,” is not appropriate. And suggesting that suffering isn’t all it’s cracked up to be will fall on deaf ears.

After all, the grass is greener on the other side, even when that grass that’s so desirable is lush with thistles and snakes.

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